Chris Howell

Monday, October 9, 2017

A brand new, recently opened office building in Cambridge has been built with the worst cycle parking access I have ever seen. The block attracts some of the highest rents in the city, and there are very limited car parking spaces available to people working in the block, so almost everyone is expected to arrive by bike, foot or public transport. You're going to need a big cycle park, and here it is, in the basement of the building:

So far so good. But I am full of admiration for the cyclists that have managed to get their bikes down there. This is the challenge required to use it...

Having got through the double door entrance, its down two steep flights of stairs, either carrying your bike, or using the slippery side ramps:

Then that special late addition to the original planning application, a sharp right angled turn:

And then its on to the third flight of stairs, and finally on through the two sets of fire doors:

A fit, able-bodied cyclist with a light bike and no panniers would struggle with these stairs - anyone else - I suspect the cycle park is utterly useless. For the lucky few with car parking spaces, there is of course a ramp that would be much better for cyclists:

But any cyclist daring to try using this faces the wrath of the building managers. Remember this is a brand new, high profile office building in the cycling capital of the UK - how has something so rubbish been built? Do we blame the developers who built it, or the Council that gave it planning permission? Perhaps we should ask Alexa?

If you are fed up with this kind of nonsense, please considering joining the Charity Camcycle (https://www.camcycle.org.uk/membership/join/) - Camcycle volunteers spend a lot of time reviewing and commenting on planning applications to try stopping stuff like this getting through - sometimes complaints are ignored by the planners, sometimes late amendments slip through the net, but many, many times applications are improved for cyclists with benefits for all road users.

Friday, June 9, 2017

Its difficult to express how angry I am with Teresa May and
the Conservative Party right now.

I spent many years actively involved in the
party - I was elected twice to Cambridge City Council, where despite the efforts of an entire constituency association since we currently have
no Councillors. I gave up investing my time in vast quantities because of frustration at how useless the
party was, and how hard the resistance to changing that was. There was no point destroying my life to help the party make progress, when surrounded by so many people in the party trying to undermine me.

The party on the ground has become a shell, the number of
activists is tiny compared to our opponents (and I don't think this is just because I live in Cambridge). The Lib Dems here must have delivered
the entire constituency around a dozen times this election, Labour not much
less - both clearly had many hundreds of people on the ground during the campaign. I'm told
Bedford has 1,000 momentum members.

But the party's behaviour, and Teresa May's
in particular during this election has been beneath contempt. There was no
leadership, no vision, no intellectual answer to Corbyn, despite ever more abuse and dishonesty from the left, there was no effective
response, no attempt to fight on the party's record over the last 7 years, and they never once saw the result coming. May
hid from debate most of the campaign. The electorate were treated with complete
contempt, as if just mentioning the word Corbyn would deliver victory. There is
no point trying to create 'Strong and Stable' as a brand if your behaviour is
completely contradictory to the brand values.

But why would party members
want to get involved in this organisation when they too were treated with such
contempt. Candidate selections conducted by an opaque clique. People who had
done nothing for the party fast-tracked to finals for successive majority seats, whilst others were blocked.
Candidates imposed on minority seats with no member involvement. The manifesto was a disaster (actually still is) - again doubtless the work of a small clique, without proper
scrutiny, and seemingly devoid of any clear principles or positive vision.
Price controls, industrial strategy, etc, etc why would any conservative want
to support this stuff. It did however contain several policies each
individually toxic enough to turn off large parts of the electorate, for no
particularly good reason - fox hunting, dementia tax etc. The tragedy is, that done well, and with decent planning, we could have been on the way to a Conservative government, with a good majority, boldly reforming society for the better. A proper adult conversation with people about the future of the NHS and social care. Real reform on tax simplification. A plan to build the houses we desperately need. Instead we have fudge.

I'd still like to be involved
in politics, but I want something I can get behind - competently run, open
accountable and transparent in how it works, democratic. Socially liberal, tolerant and international in outlook, whilst fighting tooth and nail against the Socialist vision of state control that causes chaos and misery whenever and wherever it is applied. I spent years trying to change the party from within. Maybe it needs a party
within a party to drive reform, because if they go on like this, one day people will stop
voting for them just because they are the established centre right party,
candidate selection will cease to be the remaining source of power in the party, and the
whole thing will collapse.

The party is still toxic up and down the Country - you get desensitised to the attacks from the left, but many Corbyn supporters just constantly stream vile abuse across social media. The party never challenges this, they just soak it up, not at all worried that huge numbers of normal,
professional people are getting behind a party led by marxist terrorist
sympathisers. The professional party are hopeless and the leadership appears to
be utterly clueless, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Meanwhile, we have a government in hock to the DUP and a now infinitely harder brexit negotiation to ponder. Happy days.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Below is my personal response to the current city deal consultation closing on 10th October.

I haven’t completed the questions, as they miss the point - the whole package of proposals is misguided. I also don’t think it is helpful focussing consultation on how the changes would affect the individual consultee in their current circumstances - when many people are concerned on how the proposals will impact the future development of Greater Cambridge for everyone. For the record, I usually cycle to work, and most of these proposals will have little or no impact on my personal commute at the moment - but then I am currently lucky enough to be living in housing a short cycle ride from my place of work.

Its difficult to express how hopelessly inadequate I feel the current proposals are to the challenge in hand - which to my mind is to deliver the growth of Cambridge with lots more housing and sustainable transport of a type and quality that will cause existing residents of Cambridge and the surrounding areas to welcome and embrace growth. We need to be able to look back in decades time and be proud of new housing and transport, rather than fear every new housing planning application and its impact on journeys as happens now.

The current proposals do not appear to be directed by the future development needs of Cambridge but by the obsession that someone, somewhere has with using Cambridge as a guinea pig for novel demand management techniques as the only or main tool to tackle future Cambridge congestion. Chopping down trees on Milton Road to build bus lanes, congestion charging, shutting roads, workplace charging - the local Councils have been trying to impose these on Cambridge for decades, and they completely miss the point which is that we need much more new capacity for sustainable transport.

Specifically, my problems with the current proposals:

There is not enough linkage between transport improvements and new housing developments. We need to identify more sites for housing nearer Cambridge that can be served by good quality off road public transport, and develop housing there with high levels of quality and quantity.

The budget is limited by what the government says it will provide - we should budget what is needed to provide sensible levels of additional capacity, and make the case to government for more funding, or divert more of the uplift in value from new housing developments to building the transport.

There is far too much reliance on demand management. These measures will mostly impact those who work in low paid jobs in the City, who cannot afford to live in the City and need to commute in. As such, these measures are grossly socially inequitable. Any demand management should start with real and significant new sustainable transport options. If new sustainable transport isn’t good enough to get significant numbers of people out of their cars, you won’t solve the problem with ever more oppressive demand management.

The value for money of some of the options looks awful (in terms of the incredible costs being discussed for what should be relatively trivial changes such as new bus lanes).

The plans are underwhelming in terms of new capacity for cycling and walking, and non-existent in terms of new off road capacity for other public transport. We need to look at where corridors can be identified to build new capacity (be it guided bus, light or heavy rail, trams or other more futuristic solutions) to connect housing to jobs and leisure opportunities. If corridors can’t be created above ground, we need to look at tunnelling.

I can’t recall a previous set of proposals in Cambridge that have attracted such near universal derision as the current City Deal plans - or the scale of significant alternative proposals from third-parties aghast at what is being suggested.

We are living in one of the most economically dynamic growth areas on the planet. Please tell me we can do better than what is being proposed here. You need to go back to the drawing board (ideally not using expensive consultants who appear to have a limited understanding of the Cambridge context).

Friday, May 13, 2016

Can any of my friends in politics explain why for the love of god we need to create a new completely-unenforceable offence of watching iPlayer without a TV licence, when there are technical solutions already in use by many many media organisations who have found ways to ensure only those that have paid for their content can watch or read it?

The TV licence is past its sell by date and needs to go now. It is the most regressive form of taxation on the statute book - a single parent on benefits pays the same as Richard Branson (and rather more than the Queen). Hundreds of thousands of people are prosecuted and fined annually for licence evasion - disproportionally women and the less well off. Every single one of these prosecutions occurs because a vulnerable person caves in to a TV licensing campaign of harassment and threats directed at everyone who legitimately or not doesn't have a license - and they self-incriminate. There is no effective way to gather evidence of the offence being committed without snooping into people's private homes and bullying or conning them.

Working on the basis that the government isn't intending to give TV licensing access to everyone's internet history (although scarily with Teresa May in the Home Office its hard to be sure this is the case) - watching iPlayer without a license will be a new offence with no plausible method of enforcing the law. 'Have you watched iPlayer without a licence?' 'Go away its none of your business' would appear to be completely effective. It doesn't need to be against the law - just put it behind a paywall (this doesn't require a new law, or statutory instrument as the government is thinking of doing to avoid debate and scrutiny).

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

You would think the last thing the UK tax system needs is yet more complexity. But George Osbourne can't resist playing politics - with yet another budget announcement designed entirely around the headline it generates and to hell with the consequences.

And so in today's budget we have the hit on interest relief for buy-to-let landlords. As the budget report (para 1.191) says:

'The government will restrict the relief on finance costs that landlords of residential property can get to the basic rate of income tax. The restriction will be phased in over 4 years, starting from April 2017. This will reduce the distorting effect the tax treatment of property has on investment and mean individual landlords are not treated differently based on the rate of income tax that they pay. It will also shift the balance between landlords and homeowners.'

At this point I'm struggling to understand what this even means. The stuff about different treatment of landlords based on their tax rates is complete doublespeak - this _introduces_ differential treatment.

My understanding is that interest is currently a 100% allowable deduction against the rental income landlords derive from their letting business - it isn't a relief against tax paid, so who knows what the actual impact of this tax change is going to be. But I think we can safely assume that at soon as your income goes above the threshold for paying 40% tax, as well having to pay 40% tax on the additional income, if you have a buy to let property, something bad is going to happen to your ability to offset your interest costs against your rental income, and your effective marginal tax rate on each extra £1 of income will rocket - to 60% maybe - hard to tell - but yet another daft discontinuity in marginal tax rates depending on your circumstances, to add to the child benefit tax changes and other tweaking that now goes on at arbitrary points in the income scale.

The baying mob at this point is probably screaming, yeah, go George - stuff those evil buy-to-let landlords and their profiteering high rents. Personally, I think the baying mob is wrong. Rents are set by the balance between supply and demand (that's basic economics), not some grand collusion between millions of small landlords. Buy to let landlords frequently accept rents that represent a terrible return on a risky asset - 3-4% rental yield before costs in many cases - and interest is a very real cash cost to the landlord - it gets tax relief for a good reason.

But lets go with it, and assume you think this is a great idea in principle - let's predict what will now happen.

If you are an affected landlord, your marginal tax rate is now so high that buy to let property investment is not going to make much sense. If you are close to the higher rate threshold, you might decide to put more cash into your pension to go under the threshold, effectively getting relief on the pension contributions at your new much higher marginal tax rate and avoiding the new charge.

The more enterprising taxpayers who aren't in a position to do this, will look for other forms of tax avoidance. Maybe buy properties in a limited company wrapper, where interest will presumably still be a fully allowable expense. Cue dozens more pages in the UK's already overbloated tax code describing new emergency anti-avoidance measures the Chancellor will dream up to stop this wicked reluctance to submit to his will, and try to frame the circumstances in which a property sold to a limited company will be taxed as if it is owned by the person who owns some or all of the shares. This may work, but if so, it may also impact on companies like Property Partner, setup to provide easy access to the buy to let market for those that don't want to buy a whole property themselves (or will this just be an easy way round the new rules?).

But the most likely outcome is that many buy-to-let landlords on higher rate tax will choose to sell up. This will inevitably increase private sector rents. It may not be much consolation to those trying to buy properties either, as the lower funding from buy-to-let investors will probably also restrict the supply of new housing. Some new developments relying on the capital provided by buy-to-let landlords may not happen, or be seriously delayed, making things worse for everyone looking to buy or rent. There is also the regional aspect - in London I suspect almost all buy-to-let landlords are higher rate taxpayers, so the situation there for people looking to rent might deteriorate very rapidly.

There could be further knock on effects on the supply of private rental property, as even landlords not affected are aghast at the arbitrary nature of the changes made to the UK tax system, and decide their low returns on property don't reflect the risks, newly expanded to include political risks.

I am a buy to let landlord, but I think I am going to do OK out of this - my rent and my property value should go up in the medium term - I just pity people looking for private rental accommodation. I passionately believe that government should legislate in a way that really would seriously harm existing buy to let landlords investors like me - by making it easier for the market to build lots more houses, so that the market value of housing falls, reducing the cost to both buy and rent property - but I am still a landlord as sadly I don't believe they will do this any time soon. Indeed the change announced today will have the opposite effect - it will hit those currently providing a key source of funding for new housebuilding so reduce new housing supply, it will increase rents whilst creating a yet more complex tax code - this is another truly dreadful tax change.

And it was the home of Oliver Cromwell, who defeated the Scots at Dunbar, incorporated Scotland into his protectorate and transported the Scots as slaves to the colonies. Now, there is an answer to the West Lothian question—but not one, of course, that I would recommend.

What to make of that? Reasonable attempt at humour - the absurdity of something as obnoxious as transportation being suggested as a solution to a modern political problem? Slightly ill-advised foray into a controversial (albeit nearly 400 year old) historical incident?

Fast forward a couple of days, and thanks to the power of the internet, how about these assessments:

Resign...your speech was disgusting

You are a disgrace to society

Bigoted disgrace. Shame on you.

Or maybe this one:

The only people you have to mock are your wanker parents who conceived you, and always keep in mind: You are a bloody parasite paid by our taxes, do not forget that hooker !!!

Then of course no assessment of a Conservative party politician is complete without:

Racist.

Really quite racist in fact:

Your speech in the HoC has to be one of the most racist things I have seen in Parliament, you should apologise immediately

Or to go further:

Don't the Tories vet their candidates for nazi views before they select them ? Are you the MP for Auswich ? (sic)

You can read the full horror of some of the comments on a thread on Lucy's facebook page about a harmless meeting with a local housing association that has now had nearly 500 comments.

The joy of Facebook is you can find out much about the people making these comments. You can find what types of thing they link to and find amusing. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader - but its no surprise that a great number of those commenting live in Scotland and probably have never met Ms Frazer or visited SE Cambridgeshire. I'm not shocked or outraged by the behaviour of the 'Cybernats' - I'm actually pretty sad.

Because at the end of it, you think 'who on earth would want to be an MP and have to put up with this level of appalling and undeserved abuse.'? And the answer is obvious - it will tend to be those that really couldn't care less about what people think of them or their behaviour. Our lovely friends from north of the border, once they calm down from their ultra-nationalistic fervour, might want to consider if that was really the outcome they were looking for as they typed away furiously on their keyboards.

Elsewhere in her maiden speech, Lucy mentions

My great-grandparents fled to this country with nothing, with no possessions and no money, not even speaking the language, and Britain gave them a home. It gave them hope and it gave them a future.

I just hope that there hasn't been too much of that optimism destroyed over the last couple of days.

Monday, January 19, 2015

The distinctly anonymous ‘Friends of Ditton Meadows’ http://www.friendsofdittonmeadows.org.uk/ has been setup to ‘To protect Ditton Meadows from the current threat of development, namely the proposed cycle and foot bridge across the meadow.’ They have other objectives like ‘To oppose the talked about guided bus-way across the meadows’ and ‘To oppose any development on the meadows in the future.’ But as nobody is planning a busway or other development, it’s fair to say their main aim is opposition to a new cycle/footbridge across the common.

What impact will this have on the common? There are lots of pretty pictures of Ditton Meadows on their website - but not a single view pictured will change as a result of the proposed new bridge. That’s because it will occupy a tiny proportion of the common, and will only ever be visible with the backdrop of a not particularly picturesque railway bridge. I’m struggling to see how anyone can seriously oppose this on the grounds of its impacts to the commons as these are negligible.

However, not building the new bridge will be really BAD NEWS for lots of reasons. It will stop lots of residents of Abbey Ward and Fen Ditton from easily accessing the new station by foot and cycle (or at all!) – losing them much of the economic benefits. Some will drive, further clogging up Newmarket Road and Chesterton. Others will take the approx 1 mile detour over the Green Dragon bridge – like it isn’t already busy enough at peak hours. Fellow Chesterton residents will also miss out on a more convenient new route to Abbey, Fen Ditton and ultimately to the Mill Road area, Station and Addenbrookes, when the Chisholm Trail is built.

I hope our elected representatives will be supportive of the new bridge, but it would be a disaster if a few vocal opponents were able to block a vital part of the sustainable transport infrastructure needed in a growing Cambridge. Please don’t just rely on them to make the right decision – write to them today (you can use the website www.writetothem.com to find and contact your local Councillors) and urge them to make sure this bridge happens.

About Me

I live in Cambridge and work as an accountant whilst I work out what I want to do when I grow up.
In past lives I've worked in the IT industry, and been a Conservative City Councillor. I'm now in remission and the recovery is going OK, but I am prone to relapses, when I might get overly excited by geeky things or housing policy. A nice pint of beer usually calms me down though.
Contact me by email - chris@moufflon.co.uk